Customer Reviews

Murder at the New York World's Fair

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Phoebe Atwood Taylor (1909-1976) is best known for writing two mystery series. One features Cape Cod amateur sleuth Asey Mayo. Leonidas Witherall is the main character of the second, which Taylor wrote under the pen-name of Alice Tilton. This book was released under another sobriquet, one solely attached to this one: Freeman Dana. And it belongs to neither series run. Instead, it was commissioned by Random House publisher Bennett Cerf with the intent of coinciding with the opening of the New York World's Fair in 1939. Ms. Taylor's task was to write a novel that would place a murder mystery in the middle of an event that had not yet happened, at a location that had yet to be built: a fiction based on a future reality. Just for accomplishing that goal, she should get five stars.

In the 1987 reprint of this book, the introduction by Dilys Winn and the afterword by Ellen Nehr both help to put the creation of Ms. Taylor's work into perspective. The author was provided with as much information as was possible during the two years before the Fair opened in 1939: maps of the proposed fair grounds, relevant newspaper clippings, random bits of background. On April 30, 1938, exactly one year before the grand opening, Taylor joined a preview tour of the fair grounds so that she could get a personal sense of the space, complete with people in it. That must have done the trick, for she was able to send the first draft to Cerf on June 2nd. Final revisions were done by the end of August, and the manuscript went to the printer soon afterward. A copy is said to have been buried in a time capsule at the site of the Fair.

On to the story. Daisy Tower, 67-year-old widow of former Massachusetts governor Boylston Tower, is one of five people in Boston who has gotten a free ticket to ride the Golden Dart, the private train of businessman Conrad Cassell. Their destination is New York City and the 1939 World's Fair. But the five don't understand why they've been permitted on the train; and their host doesn't get it either, as he explodes when he finds these intruders in his cars. Unbeknownst to Cassell and his staff, a sixth person has gotten on board as well. He's found dead in Cassell's locked office when the party arrives in New York. Who is he, really? Who killed him and why? Can Daisy get to the bottom of all of these oddities -- and take in the sights of the Fair -- without calling too much attention to herself? After all, she *did* escape from her nephew's house, and people back home are dragging horse ponds in an attempt to find her. Her photo has shown up on the front page of the newspaper. She'll have to come up with a disguise of some sort; and it turns out that the Fair environment is the perfect place to find one. And can she trust her four detrained colleagues to help with her investigation? Each one of them has enough baggage to be labeled a possible suspect in the crime, unfortunately.

"Murder at the New York World's Fair" is complex, down-to-earth, far-fetched, and just plain fun to read. I like Taylor's Asey Mayo books. But this is her one and only shot with a female protagonist taking the investigative lead. To that end, Taylor may have been influenced by Agatha Christie, who introduced the character of Miss Marple in her own book ("Murder at the Vicarage") in 1930. She may also have learned a thing or two from Christie's "Murder on the Orient Express," the Hercule Poirot train-based mystery which was released in 1934. It's too bad we don't have more adventures with Daisy Tower. Nevertheless, this story stands the test of time and should still command a wide readership among mystery aficionados.